Technical Field
The disclosure relates to a management device, a management method, a terminal device, a control method, and a program.
Related Art
Social network games provided to members of SNSs, social networking services, have been known. The SNSs do function as a portal site for social network games provided to members, and manage member information of users of the SNS and information of the users in each social network game in association with each other. For this reason, for example, members who are in a friend relationship can mutually know what games others are playing and, if they are playing a game but a person in a friend relationship with them is not, they can invite the member to play the game via the SNSs.
There are social network games that, rather than being provided to SNS members can be used even without being a member of an SNS, these being referred to herein as independent social network games. Applications such as these independent social network games are so-called native applications, which can be used by downloading them from a store site that sells applications or from a dedicated site for each individual application and installing them.
With such native applications, if another user is to be invited to an application that a user is using, the method that has been used is that of utilizing social media or e-mail. With this method, the inviting user gives notification (invitation notification) of the user ID and the user receiving the invitation inputs the user ID of the inviting user when starting to use the application to which the invitation was received, so as to establish a relationship between the inviting user and the invited user.
There are cases in which a user that is in a friend relationship with a user via a certain application but wishes to make an invitation to a different application. Using the above-noted method, however, it might be that it is unclear whether the user to be invited is using social media, or that the user's e-mail address might be unknown. Additionally, users who are in a friend relationship regarding an application are not necessarily in a friend relationship in the real world, and there are many cases in which the name (nickname) used within an application does not coincide with the user name (account name) used in social media or for e-mail used in the real world. With the above-noted method, therefore, there have been cases in which it is not possible to make an effective invitation notification to a user to be invited. For this reason, there has been a desire for an arrangement between the application to which the invitation is to be made and the inviting application, whereby it is possible to invite a user. However, because each application manages the user information in each of the applications in a unique manner, there is incompatibility of user information between applications. For this reason, there have been cases in which a user who is a friend in a given application could not be invited to a different application.